Monday, November 2, 2015

BOOK REVIEW: A MAN'S WORLD...

NEW BIO TELLS SAD, COMPLICATED TALE OF 1960s BOXING CHAMPION...But Will We Ever Know The Whole Story about Emile Griffith?

by Don Stradley

If they ever decide to make a
movie on Emile Griffith’s life based on Donald McRae’s A Man’s World: The Double Life of
Emile Griffith, this is how the opening scene should play: Griffith,
wearing an electric pink jumpsuit, is dancing at his favorite Times Square gay
bar while an entourage of transvestites and young Latino males scream
encouragement. Then, as the NYPD arrives to bust up the place, Griffith sneaks
out. He heads home in a pink convertible, past the old Madison Square Garden
where he’d thrilled so many fans during his boxing career,back to his swanky Weehawken apartment where
the partying continues. He climbs into bed with his favorite fellow, but the
camera zooms in on Griffith’s tortured face as he begins to weep. According McRae,
the five time boxing champ was often in tears.

It was, McRae writes, a life of
melancholy broken up by occasional bursts of happiness.Griffith, a winner of 85
professional bouts and twice chosen by boxing writers as Fighter of The Year,
was forced to keep his love life buried away, for fear of how the macho world
of boxing would react. It was a constant game of denial, as sportswriters needled
at Griffith, asking about his past as a designer of women’s hats, and why there
were no women in his life. It wasn’t much of a secret, really. Griffith never
denied himself the company of men, especially younger ones that he would
introduce as his “nephew” or “son.” But he knew any public declaration of his
personal life wouldn’t go over well, not at a time when New York was in the
middle of what appeared to be a queer witch hunt, partly because, of all
things, the 1964 World’s Fair was coming. Mayor Robert Wagner felt it would be
bad publicity if the rest of America saw New York’s streets crowded with gays.
It wasn’t uncommon in those days to see gays arrested and locked away, or
thrown into psychiatric wards where they’d undergo everything up to and
including electroshock therapy. It was a time when Griffith’s friends protected
themselves by carrying box cutters and lead pipes in their bags.Griffith never liked the word
“gay.” Something in his Caribbean background bristled at the word; he didn’t
know why people used it to describe him, and said it made him “sound like a
freak.” Of course, old-time psychiatrists would consider him a textbook case,
with an absent father, a controlling mother, and an ugly encounter in the
Virgin Islands of his youth, when a dirty old man lured young Griffith to a
shed and molested him. Griffith nursed a lifelong puzzlement over the entire
gay phenomenon.He loved his gay
friends, had his most fulfilling relationships with men, but was baffled when
people called him “gay.” Who knows what the word really meant to him? And how
would he feel to know that each new book or documentary exposes a bit more of
Griffith? McRae doesn’t merely say that Griffith enjoyed dancing with men, he describes
scenes where Griffith is up on a pedestal like a go-go boy, being felt up by men
in drag. I can almost hear Griffith saying, “Why do you write about me this
way?”When pressmen weren’t writing
articles that hinted at Griffith’s sexual preferences, they were badgering him
about his 1962 title bout with Cuba’s Benny ‘Kid’ Paret, the one that resulted
in Paret’s death. It was the third time they’d fought, and Paret had been taunting
Griffith ever since the weigh-in of their second bout. In fact, McRae reveals
that Paret’s taunting had been far more graphic and crude than we’ve previously heard
about. The fight, shown on ABC television on a Saturday evening, ended with
Paret slumping to his death as Griffith punched away at his head. And just like
that, the happy go lucky Griffith, who’d started boxing just a few years
earlier as a bubbly kid, had a dark cloud over him at all times. For most
fighters of Griffith’s time, being gay would’ve been enough of a cross to bear.
Killing an opponent in the ring would be, too. Griffith had both things to
contend with, which provided him with a piercing way of describing our screwed
up society: “I kill a man and most people forgive me. However, I love a man,
and many say this makes me an evil person.”The book reads like a biography
wrapped in a history lesson, with McRae giving us plenty about the Cuban
missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination to provide a sort of grim, 1960s
backdrop for the Griffith story. What’s intriguing is that, aside from the
gayness, Griffith’s story isn’t much different from any other pug’s tale.
Griffith was a simple, inarticulate man surrounded by a family of bloodsuckers
who spent his money faster than he could make it. He fought long past his prime
to help support them, and ended up with dementia
pugilistica. His final days were spent in a Hampstead NY care facility,
sitting in bed staring into space.McRae tries to find as many high
points as possible, including the boxing triumphs over Luis Rodriguez and Nino
Benvenuti, and the time when Griffith stood up to South Africa’s Apartheid
government and said he wouldn’t fight in Soweto unless his white trainer was
allowed in his corner. But the good times never feel like total victories
because we know there’s so much sadness to come. The nightmares that haunted
Griffith after the death of Paret are given an entire chapter, and they are
chilling. A cackling Paret kept appearing in Griffith’s dreams, offering his
cold damp hand to shake, the hand of death. Many fighters have inadvertently
caused the death of an opponent, and in Griffith’s time there seemed to be a
high profile ring death every few months, but has any fighter ever suffered
guilt the way Griffith did? And has any fighter been so closely associated with
a ring death as Griffith? Even later, when he became a trainer, Griffith was in
Wilford Scypion’s corner when Scypion caused the death of Willie Classen. Death
by violence followed Griffith everywhere, and nearly caught him when, much
later in life, he walked out of a gay club and was nearly beaten to death by
thugs. The attack put him in the hospital for four months. The nightmare played on. To McRae’s credit, he doesn’t
oversell Griffith as a fighter. Griffith was good, though. After the death of
Paret, Griffith grew shy about hurting opponents. Yet, he
was still able to win fights just by using basic boxing skills, a good jab, enough pressure to win rounds. Imagine trying to win fights without hurting a guy? Griffith was good enough to do it. Then, in his
mid-thirties and just about washed up, he gave reigning middleweight champ
Carlos Monzon a pair of gritty, close fights, nearly winning a
sixth world title. Considering Griffith never wanted to be a fighter in the
first place and would’ve been happy working at a millenary, his ring
accomplishments were impressive, well worth his eventual induction into the
International Boxing Hall of Fame. He went in with the 1990 class, the first group inducted, which included Ali, Louis, Robinson, all the best. That Griffith was part of the 1990 class is astonishing. He'd only taken up the sport when his boss at the hat factory noticed his physique and suggested Griffith enter a local tournament. Talk about being plucked from obscurity!While the book is enjoyable,
there are shortcomings. McRae writes with a heavy hand and leans toward the
sentimental. There are times when McRae seems downright dumb with his choice of
words, such as when he describes Griffith as being “both a king and a queen,”
or when referee Ruby Goldstein breaks a clinch between Griffith and Paret as if
they were “two teenage lovers caught canoodling on a park bench.” McRae is better
off when he doesn’t try so hard, like when he describes the distressed Griffith
speaking to the press after the Paret disaster, when “words fell from him in a
broken mess.”McRae’s portraits of other
fighters are well drawn, such as the sharpshooting Rodriguez, known as “El Feo”
(The ugly one), and bighearted Joe Frazier, who befriended Griffith. I
especially liked McRae’s depiction of Griffith’s trainer, the stoic Gil Clancy.
Paret, too, is given a detailed treatment; one feels for the Kid as he
complains of headaches for months before his tragic night with Griffith. Still, McRae has an unfortunate urge
to insert himself into the story. Those chapters feel mawkish, with McRae
visiting Griffith at the care facility, trying to speak to the oblivious old
fighter, “my hand curled around Emile’s.” A chapter where McRae visits Orlando
Cruz, a fighter who came out as gay in recent years, feels forced into the book
and doesn’t amount to much. By the 10th time McRae hauls out
Griffith’s quote about killing a man, you may want to kill McRae.The book’s biggest flaw, though,
is McRae’s attempt to turn Griffith into a sort of gay Joe Louis or Jack
Johnson. There may be something to this angle, and it’s possibly how McRae
pitched the book to his publishers, but it’s a stretch. McRae’s suggestion that
Griffith hearing a gay slur was more hurtful than being called a racial slur is
also suspect, as is the notion that the gay rioters outside the Stonewall Inn
battled the NYPD “as if the spirit of Emile Griffith…had entered every one of
them.” I doubt the bottle throwing transvestites were thinking much about
Griffith at all. Besides, shortly after the Stonewall riots, Griffith was
involved in a sham marriage with a former member of the June Taylor Dancers, hardly
the action of a gay freedom fighter.But then, when one writes about such
a sad and complicated figure as Griffith, there’s a tendency to elevate him, to
find some reason for his life other than pain and sorrow. Freddie Wright, an
old friend of Griffith’s, put it well for McRae: “Emile lived in two worlds. He
was a great fighter and they loved and respected him in boxing. In his other
world, in my world, he made gay people feel so proud – especially because he
was a world champion boxer. We not only respected and liked Emile, we loved him. Yeah, he lived two lives, but
each one should be remembered. Each one should be celebrated.”Fair enough. That’s why McRae’s
book, as uneven as it may be, is worth a read.

About Me

I write for various magazines, including the great CINEMA RETRO, and the Film Noir Foundation's official magazine, Noir City. Check them out if you love movies.

I currently serve as the editorial consultant for thefilmdetective.tv, a movie streaming service that does everything from restoring old films to selling a vast collection of DVDs. Download our classic movie app!

Along with movie and arts coverage, I've written about boxing for The Ring, and ESPN.com; I've written true crime stories for the short-lived HUB; and I occasionally publish historical tales in Wild West magazine. I've also written for a bunch of newspapers in the Boston area.

THIS DAZZLING TIME is where you'll find a bit of everything. I appreciate having your attention for a moment or two.